Whispers in the Loggia

Great article about Rocco Palma titled 'We are always missing the other half' - Catholic Herald. Rocco operates a wonderful blog called Whispers in the Loggia, which to date had received about 11 million hits.

He's a Philly boy so check it out!

Born in Philly in 1983, Palmo really does come across in person as the new media
whizz kid that he is. There is a touch of the geek about him, but these days geeks are the coolest people around. George Weigel wrote recently that Pope John Paul II ran the Church from his rooms in the Vatican, by-passing the Curia entirely. Perhaps it is fitting that Palmo, a true member of the JPII generation, writes Whispers from his parents' house, bypassing the mainstream media and the Catholic press entirely.

Although he grew up in very Catholic Italian American family, Palmo really came to his faith through newspapers. His father worked on the circulation side of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Palmo often accompanied him to the office. He learned the ropes in the newsroom there, with a number of internships.

When he started, he says that people "wrote to me saying: 'You really must be a cardinal writing under a pen name' or 'you applied to the seminary and you're bitter that you got kicked out'."

"I never applied. If anything I hope I wouldn't have got kicked out or rejected or whatever, but really the blog just comes from loving the Church and wanting to just examine it. Not as in putting it on trial, but in order to show that there's always more to the story. Because obviously, in the secular press you can only fit in a certain number of inches and there's only a certain amount of interest."

Palmo was surprised and a bit frightened by the success of his blog. "I started the page as a sort of catharsis with three people and never gave the address to anyone else and then five months later discovered it was written on napkins during the [2005 papal] conclave and passed around," he recalls. "My first thought was, I need to kill this thing."